Zero Knowledge

In this episode, Anna Rose catches up with Sean Bowe, a Zcash core developer now leading work on Tachyon, the upcoming Zcash shielded pool upgrade. They discuss the evolution of Zcash’s technical roadmap over the past five years and how it has influenced the design of Tachyon.

Sean then walks through the cryptographic ideas behind Tachyon, including its proving systems, new techniques for pruning nullifiers without disrupting other parts of the protocol, and how the upgrade aims to address Zcash’s remaining scalability bottlenecks. They also explore plans for Zcash governance, wallet UX, and the long-term outlook for privacy-focused zero-knowledge systems.
Related Links

Tachyon Website
Zcash
Electric Coin Company (ECC)
Halo (ZK Proof System)
Orchard Shielded Pool
Tachyon (Zcash Upgrade)
ZK Podcast: Halo with Sean Bowe and Daira Hopwood from ECC
ZK Podcast: Sean Bowe on SNARKs, Trusted Setups and Elliptic Curve Cryptography
zkSummit4: Sean Bowe on Halo: Recursive Proofs without Trusted Setups
A Note on Notes: Towards Scalable Anonymous Payments via Evolving Nullifiers and Oblivious Synchronization by Bowe and Miers








zkMesh+ launches today! Subscribe for zkMesh+ and catch the latest State of ZK 2025 report.







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We share some updates about the upcoming episodes and the ZK Podcast & ZK Hack ecosystem - specifically zkMesh+ launching this Wednesday. zkMesh+ will bring together work from the Zero Knowledge Podcast, ZK Hack, and ZK Mesh. Subscribers will have access to a set of additional resources, including:
the quarterly State of ZK Report
monthly addendums on adjacent technologies such as FHE, iO, and MPC
early access and discounts for events like zkSummit and ZK Hack hackathons
select subscriber-only Zero Knowledge Podcast segments and other experimental content


If that sounds interesting, you can subscribe ahead of launch directly on the ZK Mesh Substack https://zkmesh.substack.com/subscribe

In this end-of-year episode, Anna recaps the major ZK themes of 2025 and gives a preview of what’s coming in 2026 — new episodes, a mini-series, zkSummit14, and the rollout of ZK Mesh Plus, a unified space for newsletters, educational content, and events.

She highlights this year’s core research threads, from lattices and Ligero to quantum security, ZK-ID systems, emerging applications, and the ongoing push toward better proving benchmarks. Anna wraps with reflections on why privacy tech is becoming more urgent in the age of AI and what the community will be exploring next year.
Related Links

Ecosystem
ZK Whiteboard Sessions 
ZK Mesh
Subscribe to ZK Mesh
ZK Podcast substack
State of ZK Report


ZK Systems Story
Back to the Future with Zero Knowledge
Zero Knowledge Systems, Privacy and Security with Jonathan Wilkins
The Founding of Zero Knowledge Systems with Austin Hill


Lattices
Implementing LatticeFold with Matthew and Albert from Nethermind 
Lattices, Folding, & Symphony with Binyi Chen
ZK Whiteboard:Lattice-based SNARKs, w/ Vadim Lyubashevsky
ZK Whiteboard:LatticeFold, w/ Binyi Chen


Ligero
Ligero for Memory-Efficient ZK with Muthu
ZK Whiteboard:The Ligero Proof System, w/ Muthu Venkitasubramaniam


Quantum
Quantum Engineering with Jelena Vučković
Quantum Punks with Alex and Nicola
Countdown to Q-Day with Project 11

Pratyush Mishra on Tiny Proofs, Folding, Low-Memory SNARKs and More

26.11.2025 | 1 Std. 2 Min.

In this episode, Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt catch up with Pratyush Mishra, Assistant Professor of Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania. They discuss the various themes in his ZK research and some of the works he has been a part of in the last few years. They explore how Garuda and Pari achieve extremely small SNARK proofs, how Arc facilitates hash-based folding, proximity proofs with FICS and FACS, his work on low-memory SNARKs, and ZK applications outside the blockchain space.

Pratyush shares how these ideas intersect with one another, from faster proving to smallest proof sizes to real-world uses. He also touches on his collaborations with other leading cryptographers like Benedikt Bünz and Alessandro Chiesa, and how ZK is finding its place in broader computer science.



Related Links
Garuda and Pari: Faster and Smaller SNARKs via Equifficient Polynomial Commitments
Arc: Accumulation for Reed--Solomon Codes
FICS and FACS: Fast IOPPs and Accumulation via Code-Switching
Scribe: Low-memory SNARKs via Read-Write Streaming
Coral: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge CFG Proofs
Hekaton: Horizontally-Scalable zkSNARKs via Proof Aggregation
Query-Optimal IOPPs for Linear-Time Encodable Codes
Time-Space Trade-Offs for Sumcheck
Blendy: A Time-Space Tradeoff for the Sumcheck Prover
Accumulation without Homomorphism
vSQL: Verifying Arbitrary SQL Queries over Dynamic Outsourced Databases
Succinct Arguments in the Quantum Random Oracle Model
Lattices, Folding, & Symphony with Binyi Chen












Aztec

In this episode Anna Rose and Nico Mohnblatt chat with Binyi Chen, researcher at Stanford University. They discuss his work on lattice-based folding schemes, revisit LatticeFold and LatticeFold+, and cover how lattices enable low-cost, post-quantum-secure folding by replacing Pedersen hashes with Ajtai commitments. They discuss the early folding work from 2023 and how it has evolved and explore the advantages of lattices over other approaches in the folding context while also highlighting their tradeoffs.

Binyi goes on to introduce Symphony, his new work that eliminates the need to implement Fiat-Shamir in the recursive verification circuit, and describes how that improves efficiency and removes the chances for a KRS-style attack.



Related Links
Binyi Chen’s Website
LatticeFold: A Lattice-based Folding Scheme and its Applications to Succinct Proof Systems
LatticeFold+: Faster, Simpler, Shorter Lattice-Based Folding for Succinct Proof Systems
Symphony: Scalable SNARKs in the Random Oracle Model from Lattice-Based High-Arity Folding
Protostar: Generic Efficient Accumulation/Folding for Special-sound Protocols
ZK Whiteboard Sessions:SEASON 3 MODULE 3: Lattice-based SNARKs, w/ Vadim Lyubashevsky
ZK Whiteboard Sessions:SEASON 3 MODULE 4: LatticeFold, w/ Binyi Chen
Implementing LatticeFold with Matthew and Albert from Nethermind
Lattice-based ZK Systems with Vadim Lyubashevsky




Further Reading
Generating Hard Instances of Lattice Problems by M. Ajtai 
SWIFFT: A Modest Proposal for FFT Hashing
Delegating Computation: Interactive Proofs for Muggles
How to Prove False Statements: Practical...